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SQL & PL/SQL

virtual columns in 11g
Oracle has supported stored expressions for many years, in views and function-based indexes. Most commonly, views enable us to store and modularise computations and expressions based on their underlying tables' columns. In more recent versions (since around the 8i timeframe), we have been able to index expressions using function-based indexes. Now, with the release of 11g, Oracle enables us to store expressions directly in the base tables themselves as virtual columns.

Finding gaps is classic problem in PL/SQL. The basic concept is that you have some sort of numbers (like these: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26), where there’s supposed to be a fixed interval between the entries, but some entries could be missing. The gaps problem involves identifying the ranges of missing values in the sequence. For these numbers, the solution will be as follows:
START_GAP END_GAP
4 4
7 7
11 14
16 19
24 24

Oracle performance tuning is an excellent source of myths. The very best ones have a group of adherents who continue to support the myth even when presented with counter-examples. Who’s heard of these?

Joins are faster than sub-queries

Sub-queries are faster than joins

Full Table Scans are bad

Those ones have been around as long as I can remember. Probably the single greatest concentration of Oracle performance tuning myths centres on Bitmap Indexes. Are these familiar?

Bitmap indexes are good for low-cardinality columns, whereas B-Tree indexes are good for high-cardinality columns.

This is first post of the four-part epic - The Bitmap Conspiracy - detailing the structure and behaviour of Bitmap Indexes. Later in the series we will cover the internal structure of Bitmap Indexes, how Oracle uses them, and finally we will expose some of the myths surrounding them. But before we get there let’s just get a clear understanding of what a Bitmap Index actually is.

I’ve been tuning Oracle database applications for a long time now. I started out recognising some simple patterns and applying template fixes (Got a full table scan? Use an index!) but such a collection of “Do this; don’t do that” anecdotes will only take you so far. If you are curious (I was), you can uncover the reasons why one method is faster than another; i.e. what is the computer doing to make slow code so slow. I found that a good understanding of the internals meant that you didn’t always need to know how to tune a specific example because you could work it out for yourself.

In a database application, these investigations frequently lead to data structures; how does the database store its information and how does it retrieve it? Good information on the internals of Bitmap Indexes is hard to piece together, so in Part 2 of this Bitmap Indexing epic we will look more closely at the internals of Bitmap indexes.

This is Part 3 of The Bitmap Conspiracy, a four part epic on Bitmap Indexes.

In Part 1 we touched briefly on how Oracle can use Bitmap Indexes to resolve queries by translating equality and range predicates into bitmap retrievals. Now that we know more about how they are stored (see Part 2), let’s look closer at some of the operations that Oracle uses to access Bitmap Indexes and manipulate bitmaps.

I recently did a comparison caching mechanisms of scalar subquery caching(SSC) and deterministic functions in 11.2. Unfortunately, I do not have enough time to do a full analysis, so I will post it in parts.